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Round-ups and Deportations to Killing Centres

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Under the leadership of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Jewish Council of the Lodz Ghetto, the ghetto was turned into a working ghetto. Rumkowski believed that if the ghetto provided goods for the Nazi war effort, its residents would be safe and deportations of Jews to killing centres could be averted. Nevertheless, Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were deported from Lodz via vans and cattle cars. to death camps in Chelmno nad Nerem and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This lesson will explore Henryk Ross’s photographs of the round-ups and deportations of the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. Ross risked his life in order to take some of these images, hiding from the German police to document the sick, elderly, families and children being gathered together and sent away to be murdered. How do Ross’s photographs of the round-ups and deportations create a visual record of the process of genocide?